As life has gone on, my opinion of myself has slowly improved. I think a lot of people who knew me when I was younger probably thought that I thought more of myself, but that wasn’t the case. I guess I hid it well.
Now, my opinion of myself has improved so much that I’ve come to think of me as a slightly above average person in almost every way, and that pleases me. More and more, I find myself looking around and thinking, “I’m slightly better at that thing than a bare majority of people.”
For example, I am of slightly above average height for a male American. I think I’m of slightly above average intelligence, but I’ve never taken an IQ test. I believe I’m slightly better looking than the ordinary guy on the street, and I know I’m a little stronger than average. My musical abilities exist, which puts me above average, although I have little to no visual artistic talent, so those realms balance out to about slightly above average.
In fact, if you put me in a room of 100 people, I’d be willing to bet I’d end up in the top 45 or so for a lot of the things you could think of for the 100 of us to do to determine how we stack up against each other. Probably the one area where I would not be afraid to say that I’d be in the top 10 in that room is in writing, but even that depends on what you mean by writing.
Likely a better way to live your life would be to not measure yourself against anyone or anything, and to just be a person, figuring out how to live a good life, trying to worry less about being anything but yourself. But I think in order to do that, you’d either have to have grown up in a nearly perfect nurturing, positive, well-adjusted environment, which doesn’t exist, or you’d have to have grown up in a world absent of all other humans but yourself. And even then, most of us would probably just start looking around and thinking, “that dog is better than me at running.”
On a walk today I saw a penny, and I bent down to pick it up and there was a quarter hiding under some dirt nearby. I pocketed 26 cents and continued on my walk.
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